


the land of the living

by dramaturgicallycorrect



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 07:41:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11642028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramaturgicallycorrect/pseuds/dramaturgicallycorrect
Summary: He’s not spent six years hanging his whole hat on sailing halfway to Dunkirk, he’s not plagued by the sound of Spitfires in his dreams. He thinks he’s rather moved on from all of it, as much as he can, and the guilt that hits him, when it hits him, is momentary, fleeting. There and gone like those moments when you’re alone, in the dark, and it occurs to you afresh that one day you’re not going to wake up, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.Usually he can bottle it up, store it away inside him somewhere it won’t come rolling back out if he can help it. He can’t today, only half his mind on Aristotle.The other half of his mind thinks the boy’s eyes were green.[Or they learn when survival just isn't enough.]





	the land of the living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coldbam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldbam/gifts).



> i honestly owe my whole life right now to nicole, for the brilliant sparks of ideas, and neverending and utterly generous encouragement along the way. this doesn't exist without you. thatwasforyou.gif
> 
> additional sincere gratitude to fina as always.
> 
> this fic references war violence, past character deaths (canon and not canon), trauma, and a little smattering of period-typical homophobia. there's nothing much graphic about it. if you have questions, please let me know, i'd be happy to answer.

 

Peter takes his tea black because that’s the way his father did, but he wishes it were sweeter. He’d developed a taste for it because his dad had said you don’t always have the sugar, you don’t always have the milk. So there’s no use sending off a perfectly good cup of tea just because it doesn’t have any of the fixings.

Peter had thought it was a lesson. You don’t always get things the way you want them to be, sometimes they must come the way they are and you’ve got to live with that. He’d never asked, one way or the other, whether his dad meant something greater or he was just being practical about groceries. His dad would always budget for Peter’s school first, then tea, then milk.

He orders his tea and a single scone at a cafe he’s never been to, a single indulgence he’s talked himself into -- deserving a quiet morning without Other George. He sits outside, squinting under the sun, flipping through a paper before he goes to his first lecture.

It’s almost too picturesque to be something that fits into his life now, some sort of anachronistic echo of his youth that’s fallen out of time and landed here. He gets the odd sensation that he should be waiting for something, someone. His dad and his brother to sweep out of the cafe door with their own tea and settle down at the table.

His brother would swipe up the paper, ruffle his hair and say, “Come on, now, we all know you can’t read.”

His dad would tut fondly and swipe the paper himself, hide behind it while the two kids bickered until they got tired. They’d ask him what Hitler was up to these days, and he’d sigh and say, “I just don’t know, lads.”

But that’ll never happen again. Peter takes a sip of his tea and tells himself domestic tragedies are nothing to waste your time mourning over. Even if that doesn’t feel true.

There’s a bloke tucked into an alcove across the street, a bag at his feet, wearing a coat even though it’s the middle of summer. His fingernails are caked with dirt and underneath his greasy hair, his eyes are clear and open and staring right at Peter.

Peter looks away, red faced at being caught, even though it seems like he was being watched first. He looks back up through his eyelashes, a quick indulgent glance, at the boy’s dark expression on his sharply molded face. He watches Peter with an unnerving intensity, like he’s a predator and Peter is his prey.

He’s young, can’t be much older than Peter. His long fingers tug absently at the two disks hanging around his neck. A soldier, then.

Peter looks down at the paper, staring hard enough at a headline that it’s bound to sink in at some point, but there’s nothing about the thick black font that appears to be in English. He’s not sure why it unsettles him so much.

It could be the traitorous voice inside him, hissing that he knows, the boy knows Peter’s not served enough to have disks of his own.

He had watched the rest of the war, sitting at home, nursing his asthma and wishing he could do something else. Waiting for the call to take the boat back out. Thinking maybe he’d steal away on a Navy boat, hiding long enough that by the time anyone had caught him, it’d be too late to send him back.

He’d had blood on his hands only for a day, even though it felt like it had stained him for life. He’d seen a destroyer sink into the sea and take what he feared were hundreds of lives. It hadn’t left him disgusted, it hadn’t left him despondent. It had him wishing he could have done more.

It wasn’t ever that he wanted to make something of himself, not like George, who always spoke like he had something to prove. Peter never had anything to prove, not when he understood so well who he was and where he was -- a public school kid, spoiled and safe. He didn’t want anyone to look at him differently. He just wanted to help.

A shadow creeps over the paper, the shape of it enough of a warning that Peter knows he shouldn’t be surprised when he looks up. He’s surprised anyway.

The soldier could be beautiful, if he didn’t look so harsh. Nothing about the dark circles under his eyes or his sallow cheeks takes away from that. It’s just the severeness of his expression, how dangerous it makes him look.

Peter doesn’t have enough confidence to say, _you came over to me, you go first_. He sits silently, tense and unnerved, his feet firming against the ground in case he must make a run for it. He watches the kid and the kid watches him back and the silence thickens between them the longer they wait.

“I'm sorry about your friend,” the bloke says finally.

Peter watches him for another few seconds before the thought locks into place and seizes him. The last time he’d seen this kid, his face was smeared with oil, obscuring him from any chance of instant recognition. It's the deep furrow of his brow that does it first, then his voice, brusque and clipped.

_He's dead, mate_ rings in Peter’s ears, the first and only thing he remembers the soldier saying to him. Peter had nearly fallen apart right then, but couldn’t afford to. He’d kept his eyes trained downstairs long enough to glimpse George’s body once as the soldier moved, censured. Peter had turned away before the blanket had covered his face.

The boy’s face shifts, slightly, the intensity melting into what looks like uncertainty. Like maybe he thinks he’s misstepped -- and he has. He’s slammed Peter six years into the past with five simple words of condolence he never thought he’d hear again.

Peter was yanked by an undertow once, and the sensation of it matched something like this one. His heart is jerked one way or another, limp and helpless, as something stronger grips him and shakes him up.

He keeps his lips pressed shut, because the moment he opens them, he fears his black tea and the small bites of his scone he’s managed will come pouring out. He’s stock-still but somehow still roiling in the undertow, and it’s enough of a dismissal that the boy takes a step back, then two. Peter wonders if he’s meant to call him back, but he’s not sure if he wants to.

The boy hefts his bag onto his shoulder, fixing Peter with that near murderous gaze, before he turns and walks off.

\--

Peter’s not much older than the other kids, many of whom have come back to finish their education years after they should have. They don’t ask each other where they’ve been, why they’re well into their twenties and taking a second-year composition class together. It’s just not talked about.

He’s not spent six years hanging his whole hat on sailing halfway to Dunkirk, he’s not plagued by the sound of Spitfires in his dreams. He thinks he’s rather moved on from all of it, as much as he can, and the guilt that hits him, when it hits him, is momentary, fleeting. There and gone like those moments when you’re alone, in the dark, and it occurs to you afresh that one day you’re not going to wake up, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Usually he can bottle it up, store it away inside him somewhere it won’t come rolling back out if he can help it. He can’t today, only half his mind on Aristotle.

The other half of his mind thinks the boy’s eyes were green.

They study the classics like nobody in recent years has said anything profound enough to commit to memory. But Peter rather thinks if the ancient Greeks had really figured it all out themselves, there shouldn’t be any more confusion. Peter should have all the answers. Peter would have known how to answer him yesterday, to open his mouth and say the thing that needed saying.

He’s quiet enough that Adam has a thing or two to say about it, knocking Peter’s shoulders rough enough he nearly drops the stack of Thucydides from his arms where he’s trying diligently to shelve them. Peter grips them tighter because he needs this job and if he breaks a binding it comes out of his pay. Peter laughs and says he had a long night, which isn’t entirely false, between the sounds of Other George shagging a girl at two am and the muddy green eyes that greeted him every time he closed his own.

Adam shrugs it off and goes to greet a lady when the bell above the door chimes her entrance. Peter shelves books until they close at seven. He locks the door behind him and wishes the sun set earlier in the summer, just because it doesn’t feel like the end of a day when he leaves the shop and the sun is still blinding.

He supposes it’s just as well that the sun is still up, because his day isn’t over.

He goes to the cafe, just a couple of blocks over from the shop, and his eyes scan for the alcove across the street to find it empty. There’s no reason the boy would still be there, really, even if Peter’s suspicions about him are true.

Peter waits anyway, with a cup of black tea and a single scone, watching late commuters make their way home, patrons settle in around him, the sun slowly set in the sky. It’s ridiculous to hope, but these days that’s all most people have going for them, hope.

It pays off when the streetlights slowly start blinking on and the boy from the boat walks with his head ducked and his bag tucked low over to the alcove. He sits down and scans the street with near tactical precision. Traffic passes between the two of them for a moment but when it clears, they lock eyes.

Peter carefully keeps contact, even with the unnerving intensity that overcomes the bloke’s face again. He pulls the chair beside him out, the wood dragging loudly against the pavement. It’s a clear invitation and several breaths pass between them before the boy takes it.

He picks his way across the street, a mindlessness for traffic that makes Peter’s heart leap into his chest with a two year old pang of anxiety that passes as soon as Peter can bottle it up.

The bloke sits in the chair definitively, settled in like he’s never planning to get back up again. He doesn’t say anything, possibly because Peter doesn’t know what to say either, possibly because he got burned the last time he crossed the street to talk to Peter.

In the end, Peter goes first, with, “Hungry?”

He nods slowly, turning his frown from Peter’s cup of tea up to Peter’s face. Peter wants to tell him what his mother did when he was real young, that he should be careful frowning all the time or his face will stick that way. Maybe it’s already stuck that way.

“Wait here,” Peter says and goes inside to order another cup of tea and a whole basket of scones he really can’t afford.

When he sets the tray down, the boy doesn’t move, but the way he watches the basket betrays him. Peter takes a scone for himself first, nibbling at the edge like it means nothing, like eating them isn’t charged with responsibility, with their shared history. It’s just a scone.

The boy takes one, then speaks. His voice curls lazily around Northern vowels. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Peter looks over at him, uncertain what exactly he’s referring to. Not that he really knows how he’d answer it anyway -- here in London, here at the cafe, here sitting next to him.  

“Thought you'd be on a boat somewhere,” he elaborates once he’s shoved a whole scone in his mouth, not before he does so.

Peter sold the _Moonstone_ two days after his father's funeral, had enough money to pack up and move to London, get a flat share close to uni. He makes enough at the book shop to pay his rent and buy his groceries, doesn’t dip into the leftover stash under his bed. It’s meant to be for emergencies, for rainy days, for anything and everything that could come up.

His dad had told him to make something of himself, bright as he is, to make the most of his education, to go be the kid he could have been, to stick his head in a pile of books instead of staring out at the ocean like it was going to provide him the answers he sought. If his dad were here, he’d huff and say with a wry smile, “It’s just like you, my boy, to take my advice the moment after I can no longer tell you I was right.”

“Didn’t expect you here either,” Peter says. They’d taken all of them away on a train and Peter hadn’t been bothered to learn where it was going, what would happen to them. He’d had more important things to tackle then.

The bloke shrugs and chases his scone with a generous gulp of tea.

“Are you sleeping rough?”

The boy lifts his chin almost defiantly, looking halfway to asking Peter, _what of it_ , but he doesn’t. There’s a pride there that Peter understands in a sideways kind of way because he’s faced it before. Peter helps, when he can, where he can, and he’s not always greeted with thanks. He thinks he doesn’t need thanks, that’s not why he does it.

Peter knows enough about pride to ask anyway, whatever he can do to help the war effort, even some seven or eight months after the war is done. “You can come back to mine. If you like. For the night.”

“Don't need a handout,” he says, brusque, clipped.

“It's not a handout,” Peter says, even though it is. The boy watches him closely, his lips twisting like he knows the truth and tries to decide whether it’s worth it to believe the lie anyway.

He believes the lie, eats the entire basket of scones, and silently follows Peter home.

\--

Peter stops at the door, key suspended at the lock, because he can hear Other George banging around in the kitchen. “My flatmate, he’s -- horrible. Frankly. Don’t pay him any mind.”

The bloke grunts, unbothered.

He hates that his flatmate is named George. If given the choice, he’d have asked for someone else, anyone else, and not just because he’s horrible. Peter’s taken to calling him Other George, if only in his mind, like he doesn’t have room for more than one in there.

“I got sacked today,” Other George says in favor of a hello. He’s hunched over the hob, doing something with a heinous-smelling meat that could only very generously be considered cooking. He doesn’t even bother to look up.

“What?” Peter says, his heart thumping double time.

“Fucking sacked. I rang my father to send money, but he’s pissed I got sacked. Won’t send any ‘til I’ve got another job. You’re good for the rent, aren’t you?”

Peter breathes carefully and does the calculations in his mind. “Yeah.”

“Who’s this?” Other George asks when he turns around finally. He eyes the boy suspiciously.

Peter’s heart skips for a moment, but there’s no way he can know, really. Peter’s never brought anyone home, he’s never looked at anyone. He’s never done anything someone could suspect outside one awkward fumbling in a dark alleyway when he moved here almost two years ago that served more as a confirmation of something than chasing pleasure.

He struggles for a response once he realizes he doesn’t know the bloke’s name. He looks over for help.

“M’Alex,” he answers for himself, after an uncomfortable pause. “Doing all right, mate?”

Peter looks over at him. Alex. And remembers himself. “This is my old mate from Weymouth.”

“You don't look like you're from Weymouth,” Other George says, sweeping his eyes critically again, landing on each of the hints on Alex’s clothes or body that Peter had had the first time he’d seen him.

Alex quirks an eyebrow at him, equally unimpressed. “You don't look like a posh twat. And yet.”

“Excuse me?” Other George starts, trying to swell up like he could take Alex if he tried, but Alex is taller than both of them, probably still built like a soldier.

Peter interrupts quickly, “Alex is going to be staying for a few days. I’ll get the rent before the first of the month.”

He pushes at Alex’s back until he starts moving, ignoring the look Alex gives him, that intensity mixed with a healthy amount of confusion. Peter’s not even sure why he’d said it in the first place, so the last thing he can do is explain it. A few days, he’d said. He’s not even sure Alex isn’t going to murder him in his sleep.

He wouldn’t, though, at least not someone who’d remember the face of the boy who told him off six years ago or the body he’d covered out of respect for the dead.

Peter wishes him to be good and careful and full of compassion, even though the only thing he’s known of Alex is an offhand flippant comment followed by an act of contrition.

Alex knows even less.

“I’m Peter Dawson,” he says once he closes his bedroom door behind him.

“Alex.” He reaches a dirty hand for Peter, and Peter takes it, tries to shake as strongly as he can, but Alex’s grip proves stronger.

Peter deposits his pack onto his writing desk because there’s not really anywhere else to keep it. Between the bed and the desk and his single chest of drawers, there’s not much room for more than two people to stand around. Not that Peter’s ever had company.

Alex stands in the corner by the door, shifting on his feet and looking around before he says, “I’ll kip on the floor.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Prefer it,” Alex says, which sounds more like _used to it_.

Peter has a spare sheet, but no spare pillows, which Alex waves off before stripping his coat and bundling it under his head. Peter changes into his pajamas in the loo down the hall, and when he comes back into the room, Alex looks like he’s sleeping. He’s curled with his feet under the desk, his head near the drawers, his arms tucked close around him in a hug.

Peter can tell by the uneven rising and falling of Alex’s chest, the way his eyes look alive beneath their lids, that he’s not really asleep. Peter knows the truth and decides it’s worth it to believe the lie anyway.

\--

Peter learns nothing, not in any of his classes, not in the four hours at the shop he spends staring at the book he’s meant to read. He’d left Alex with the invitation to stay as he pleased, to fiddle with the wireless, to take what he wanted out of Peter’s cupboard and to specifically stay away from Other George’s cupboard.

There’s any number of things that could happen, just leaving Alex there alone. Alex could find the money if he wanted to, if he looked hard enough. He could trash things. Or he could just leave.

Peter tells himself the whole way home, where he walks so fast it could nearly be considered exercise, he tells himself he’s most worried about the money. But he knows he’s worried Alex just won’t be there.

Alex is.

“Hey,” Alex says. He sits at the table by the door, one of Peter’s books from school open to about halfway through. He’s bent himself almost in half in the chair, one foot propped up with an arm curled around his knee.

“Hey,” Peter answers, but it feels like he’s said a lot more than he intends, with the way relief colors his voice. He looks at the kitchen counter and doesn’t find any dishes out. Either Alex didn’t eat or he’s considerate enough to clean. Peter suspects one over the other. “Would you like some tea?”

“Cheers.”

He doesn’t know where to start, so he doesn’t. He buries himself in the ritual of tea making, not taxing by any stretch of the imagination, but Peter dedicates himself to it with a sincerity and a drive he usually reserves for work.

He slides the tea across the table to Alex, who looks at it, then looks back up at him. “Could I have milk?”

Peter pauses. “Yes.”

Alex pours the milk with precision, swirling and swirling until it changes to the correct color, the liquid nearly to the brim, before he hands the bottle back. Peter pours a small splash of his milk in too because he can’t remember the taste.

Peter sips gently, letting the flavor fill his mouth before he swallows it -- it’s odd and he can’t decide if that’s because he genuinely doesn’t like it or he’s just not used to the taste. He could grow to like it, he thinks, but that would be losing another piece of his dad. He’s done enough, selling the boat, moving to London. Splashing a bit of milk in his tea is too far, that’s just where he draws the line, he thinks with a little bit of a smile.

Alex swallows his tea and sniffs his nose and says, “What?” defensively like he’s missed a joke. He has, but it’s nothing Peter can explain to him.

Peter shrugs. “Did you have a good day?”

“Mm, I met a cat.”

“A cat?”

“On your windowsill. Couldn't figure out how to open it.”

“I think it's painted shut.”

Alex nods and drinks his tea, silent like that may have been the wrong answer.

“Did Other George behave?” Peter asks.

“Didn't see him.” He turns to Peter, that scowl having taken over his face again. “Why do you call him Other George?”

“I had a George once,” Peter says, which is the only way he can think to describe it, like he’s taking responsibility for him. No one else had, not his school where he was an average student, not his dad who was disappointed in him. He was Peter’s to be proud of, to love and support. To mourn. “You remembered him.”

Alex circles the rim of the teacup with a finger, catching a little on the chip every time he meets it. The pause is long enough that Peter thinks he’s not going to say anything at all, but then he answers, with deliberateness, “I remember everyone. Every face. Every -- everything that happened that week.”

Peter struggles to remember any of it. When he flicks back to it, it comes like shaky newsreel footage, fuzzy, jumping quickly from scene to scene. He can’t comprehend what it’d be like to remember it all. He wouldn’t want to.

“Can I ask -- what happened to him? Was it the Krauts?”

Peter thinks about it for a moment. “Just. War.”

There’s no other way around it, not without placing blame he can’t bring himself to place. The second they’d pushed off the dock, it had been a series of events too impossible to foretell, too impossible to prevent. Rotten bloody luck.

His dad had caught him once, calling that soldier a coward, and he’d given Peter what for, even grieving as he was. There was no cowardice in survival, the most human of impulses. Desperation brings out the best and the worst in people, and that’s Saint Peter’s place to judge.

“Last I checked, there weren’t a saint before your name there, lad,” his dad had said, and Peter had apologized and promised to understand.

He’d had no problem telling everyone George was a hero because he was, even dying as he did. A hero gets on the boat in the first place, knowing they might not have made it to Dunkirk.

Alex nods like he understands. He probably does.

“Why are you out on the street?” Peter asks. “Nobody set you up with a job?”

“I didn’t want it,” he says, but there’s something about the deep curve of his brow that suggests to Peter he means, _I didn’t deserve it_.

Peter’s learning there seems too often to be a difference between what Alex says and what Alex means. And when Alex says something he doesn’t mean, that’s the end of the conversation.

\--

Alex is a quiet flatmate, remarkable because Other George isn’t. Other George fills up all the spaces he can, just because he can, but Alex stays contained. Maybe he thinks filling more space than his own person is dangerous, like at any moment Peter might chuck him out if he noticed Alex was there.

Peter doesn’t plan to. He can’t quite put a finger on why, since the relief of being coupled with someone who doesn’t seem to inherently hate him doesn’t feel strong enough to cause it. It was close quarters for two, even closer for three, but Peter’s never felt claustrophobic.

The quiet helps when Peter studies for his end of term exams at his desk. Alex sits on the floor to the left of him or on the windowsill to the right, sometimes reading with that deep scowl of his because the light might not be bright enough for him, sometimes staring off at something Peter doesn’t see, always eating something.

Alex shifts beside him -- it’s the windowsill tonight, hardly enough to fit him in, but he still manages to stay folded into it. “Hey,” he says gently, but when Peter looks over, he finds Alex isn’t talking to him.

There’s a flash of yellow eyes, hardly visible from the all-encompassing way Alex plasters himself to the window. Peter shifts to get a better look. “Is that the cat?”

“Yeah.”

From what little Peter can see of it in dark, it’s mangy, soaking and dirty, and -- “It's black.”

“Yeah?”

“That's bad luck, isn't it?”

Alex looks over at him, the creases around his furrowed brows deep as they’ve always been. “There's no such thing as bad luck. Only bad choices.”

There may be something to that, there may not be. Peter doesn’t know which one’s worse, the thought that it could have been the roll of dice or a series of choices that escalate like a chain reaction. The second one makes him culpable, makes him want to look over every choice he’s ever made to figure out if he’s the architect of his own personal tragedies.

But he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter, in the end, what took his mum, his brother, his mate, his dad. The fact is they’re gone.

Alex keeps looking at him seriously, eyes flicking back and forth like he’s searching for something. “It's raining,” he says eventually.

Peter blinks. “I see that.”

“He's getting wet.”

“I'm sure it’s used to it,” Peter says, but he’s already made half of his mind up the moment Alex hints at it. Alex wants to help, Peter isn’t going to stand in his way.

They work together at the window, pressing all their strength up until it budges slightly with a sickening crack. Once they’ve overcome that, shocked the cat hasn’t run away at the noise, they’re able to ease it up enough that the cat slips in.

The cat slides quickly under the bed, despite Peter’s protests, leaving a trail of dirt and wet in its path. It’s safe now, Peter thinks blandly, but at what cost.

Alex crouches, his hand tugging at Peter’s sheets to expose him, but he stops when Peter says, “Don’t.”

Alex crooks an eyebrow at him. “Gotta lure him out.”

“I haven’t any food.”

“Get him some milk,” Alex says like a command.

Peter’s feet carry him out of the room and into the kitchen before he takes a second to figure out why.

Other George sits at the kitchen table, looking at him with something quite like disgust as he says, “The devil are you lot doing in there?”

“Nothing,” Peter responds, ignoring the implication. He fishes a saucer out that he never uses with his teacups, scrubs off the dust with his shirt, and carefully pours some milk into it.

He carries it as fast as he can manage without spilling the milk onto anything more than his fingers, and his tension softens when he returns to his room to find Alex sitting in the same position, not having gone diving under the bed.

Coaxing the cat out from under the bed takes the better part of an hour, far after the milk has gone tepid, but it doesn’t seem to mind. It laps up the milk and Alex murmurs what could be, _good boy_ , even though Peter is pretty sure it’s a girl.

Alex’s fingernails are clean, which likely means he’s finally dragged himself into the shower. He muddies them anyway, scratching gently at the cat’s back as it drinks.

“Are you going to name it?”

“No,” Alex says after a few moments of consideration. “It’s not mine.”

Maybe Alex is like him, maybe Alex only wants to help. Peter doesn’t know, because he hasn’t unearthed anything about Alex he can’t readily get from looking at him. Alex is too much in some ways -- too handsome, too thin, too serious, too rigid, too much snoring -- and not enough in others -- too quiet, too guarded.

Not that Alex owes him any of it, not that they’d made some sort of pact to become friends when Peter asked him to stay the night, stay three nights, stay five.

“Have you -- ever had a cat?” Peter asks anyway.

Alex shakes his head. “Always wanted one. Father wouldn’t have it. You?”

“No,” Peter says. It’s like a crack in a dam, trickling water out. Hardly enough to sate someone who’s thirsty, hardly enough to rupture the whole structure. But it’s a start.

\--

They don’t talk about it until they do, a few days in, when pressure against the dam builds enough that water streams out in front of them steadily.

It’s not until Peter knows both of Alex’s parents’ names, about the law firm his father runs that he couldn’t bear to join, the way his mum cried when he said he was moving to London. When Peter knows Alex likes a good joke and never learned how to ride a bicycle when he was young. When Peter knows what Alex looks like when his brows loosen and a smile takes over his face.

Other than that, there isn’t much talk of the present or the recent past, like maybe they can pretend there’s something of an eight-year gap in Alex’s life that’s worth skipping over.

Peter tells him about the boat, speaks of his father in the present tense, because admitting he thinks of his father in the past tense hurts. It becomes something of a challenge -- how to say everything but the word Dunkirk when that’s all that joined them in the first place.

He slips one day, after sunset, nothing but the streetlamp through the window illuminating the room. Peter sits on his bed, Alex is tucked into the windowsill, looking out the window, just like the cat settled at his feet does. Peter doesn’t know what they see, but he doesn’t think about that sort of thing anymore. It’s just the way they are, the pair of them.

Peter’s talking absolute nonsense, about the lads at school planning their summer trips when Peter means to stay put. He mentions offhand he’d never been to France before, he doesn’t think his last trip counted. He stops up when he realizes his misstep, his violation of their unsaid protocol, when Alex’s face twists.

“Why'd you do it? Take your boat out for us,” Alex says, and that sends Peter spinning again.

Why does anyone do anything? Why did Alex join the service? Why did Peter go to the cafe for a tea instead of brewing his own? Why didn't the car stop before it hit his dad? Why did George jump back onto the boat?

Why did Peter lock the cabin door?

“It needed doing,” Peter answers, as simply as he can manage. There was never any doubt, from the moment those officers had requisitioned their boat. There were choices, bad or otherwise, but they felt inevitable.

Alex looks like he doesn’t buy what Peter’s selling, his face going twisted with something like judgment. “It's fucking mental.”

“That's an odd way to say thank you,” Peter says, half-joking because he’s never asked for thanks. He’s never wanted anything but to do his part.

Alex watches him, steel in his jaw until he says, at length, like it’s difficult to push the words out, “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

Peter wonders why it’s judgment that’s gripped Alex, when he was the one who benefited from the private boats sailing out when so many couldn’t. Peter had never asked them, any of them on the _Moonstone,_ what their stories were. At that point he couldn’t listen, couldn’t care. He’d stayed above deck, glued to his father’s side, the rudder, anything to keep him from asking questions.

He didn’t want to be told he was mental, not like the first soldier did, he didn’t want to hear none of them were worth it. That’s what it is, isn’t it, doing up the calculations between the worth of Peter’s life versus the worth of Alex’s versus the worth of soldiers yet to come. Versus George’s life, that they might have saved if they’d turned around.

He’ll never put them into a hierarchy, he’ll never make that choice. He’d have sailed out to meet his brother’s Hurricane, same as Alex, if he’d been given the chance.

“They send you back?”

“Six months later,” Alex answers. “Once they realized there wasn’t an invasion.”

“Christ.”

“Wasn’t done serving King and country, hardly served at all. They were coming to get us so they could send us back out. The only way they could call it a victory.”

“You were a hero,” Peter says. Churchill said so, the people said so. A retreat doesn’t mean giving up. Giving up wouldn’t be a victory.

“Was I?” Alex asks, words laced with a poison that eats at Peter, makes his skin crawl.

“Yes,” Peter says. Because sometimes it’s just being there that’s enough, sometimes it’s just the nerve to get up and try. That’s what made George a hero, the fact that he’d tried at all. “You lived to fight another day.”

“I didn’t want to fight another day. They sent me back kicking and screaming.” Alex won’t look at him, keeps his eyes glued to the wall. His voice shakes, low and dangerous then. “I did things. Things I'm not proud of.”

The potential washes over Peter cold and unforgiving, like the one time he’d jumped into the Channel on a dare in winter. He doesn’t know Alex at all. He doesn’t know what he’s done but survive, pull himself onto the _Moonstone_. Peter fears the worst for a breath, for a heartbeat, when his mind traitorously thinks, _did Alex have his own George_?

He stays perfectly still, tempering his breathing as much as he can, anything to keep himself calm and collected the first real time he’s seen Alex crack open.

“There was this boy, a frog, a -- French soldier. I said -- I was scared, we were all going to die. We were going to die,” he says firmly, like he still needs convincing. “If they hadn’t -- I wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t sent me out. We were going to die.”

“Okay,” Peter says quietly, even though he doesn’t really understand. He hears his dad explaining to him what that first soldier had felt, what he’d been driven to out of shock, out of trauma. Life or death situations can bring out the best in people, but they can bring out the very worst just as easily.

Alex looks like he decides then, hard and fast, walling up faster than he usually does, like this is the end of it. “You do what you have to,” he says. “To survive.”

Peter lets go of a breath he didn’t realize he was holding in, fighting the urge to gasp as though he’s just resurfaced. He wonders if Alex means it, then, what he’s said just before he’s called the conversation over.

Peter plays it over and over in his mind -- does Alex think what he’s done was what was needing to be done? Or did he survive in spite of himself? Find himself safe on the _Moonstone_ and regret it? The ends are meant to justify the means, but there’s too much grey area in war to paint what a soldier must and mustn’t do with thick, clear black or white strokes.

Alex moves to slide off the windowsill, his hands braced and his hips shifting forward until his feet hit the floor. The cat rises too, slipping through the crack in the window into the night without a moment’s thought for saying goodbye.

Peter grabs Alex around the wrist, holding him loose so he can slip away if he needs to. Alex looks down at him, the intensity holding strong, shining down on Peter’s face like a spotlight that’s too close for comfort.

Peter nearly winces with it, wants to lift his hand to preserve his eyes from being burned by Alex’s, but he doesn’t. Instead he removes his hand and says, “You don’t have to sleep on the floor.”

It’s the only thing he can think of in the moment, the only thing that might help, that might make him feel a little more stable. There’s nothing more stable than a bed, Peter thinks, even if it’s not one that belongs to you.

Alex stands paralyzed enough that Peter considers taking it back. He has no business offering a stranger, a kid he’s only met days ago a place in his home, his bed. His thoughts.

He’s only helping, is the thing, but he can’t help the deeper feeling he gets when he looks at Alex, listens to Alex. The feeling that tells him to listen to his instincts, to pry into what Alex is hiding so he knows who he’s brought into his home.

Peter inches back, a simpler invitation, until he lies down on his side, pressed closer to the wall than he likes. He’s nowhere near tired enough to sleep, but this must be it for them. They’ve spilled too much between them tonight.

Alex settles himself onto the bed, on top of the duvet. He keeps his back to Peter, curling his arms around his chest like he always does.

They leave the window cracked, the wind whistling around the old wood. Peter can’t see his clock, but he figures it might be hours before he hears the gentle snoring he comes to expect from Alex. Hours where Peter can’t think of the right thing to say, so he says nothing at all, figuring sometimes the right thing to say is nothing.

\--

Days pass, neither of them directly addressing the war, the conversation. It’s easier that way, but it also feels false. They’re not hiding anything from each other, they’re just not speaking of it, but this one thing still feels like lying.

The rest of it starts to feel like he’s building a home. And he hasn’t had a home in two years, not since his dad passed. He wonders if it’s been longer for Alex since he’s had one too.

Peter buys more milk than he ever has, to feed his strays, two strangers he’s opened his home to. Alex cares for the cat more than he’ll ever admit, this thing he guards but refuses to own. Peter reads philosophies like it’ll open up some part of Alex and the cat he’s yet to understand. Alex looks after the cat like he’s let Peter look after him; Alex wishes the cat an autonomy he’d wanted for himself but never got.  

And then, sometimes, Peter thinks, perhaps he just likes cats and he doesn’t know how to have one.

Peter tries to ignore that he’s already dug into his emergency fund once to make up for the fact that Alex is eating him out of house and home.

There are minor disagreements, like Alex leaving his boots out where Peter can trip on them, because Alex refuses to put his things in the small portion of the already small closet Peter has worked out for him. He wonders if it’s too much like permanence, considering they’ve not said how long this is meant to last.

They argue when it’s hot in their room, the odd fly buzzing around because Alex always keeps the window open for the cat.

“You shouldn’t leave the window open,” Peter will say.

“Why not?”

“Someone could come in and steal something.”

Alex’s face will shift, almost as though to say, _steal what_?

Peter will bristle slightly. Even if Alex doesn’t know about the bag under his bed, the rest of it is still worth preserving, protecting, simply because it’s _his_.

He thinks he shouldn’t provoke Alex, do anything to spur Alex to move on. It’s more than helping now, he knows that, as days go on, he’s become more attached to Alex than he has allowed himself to in six years, but it feels different, too. The intensity of the sensation in Peter’s chest matches the intensity of the looks Alex gives him sometimes, the ones he has yet to learn how to decipher.

Alex looks that way when he’s frustrated and angry, but he also looks that way when Peter’s not done a single thing to warrant it. When Peter reads on his bed or fixes him toast or comes home early. There’s still so much Peter thinks he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know if Alex leaves while he’s away, or if he stays locked in Peter’s room to avoid Other George, to avoid the rest of the world except the bloody cat.

Peter only knows he wishes his days would pass faster now that he has something to go home to.

\--

Alex wakes sometimes, furiously, jerking as though trying to free himself of something. He breathes heavily, in and out, like he’s trying to prove a point. Maybe to convince himself he’s still alive. Peter stays quiet, unmoving, so Alex doesn’t know he’s woken Peter up. So Alex doesn’t know Peter sees him like this.

The night he hits Peter changes things. If only because Peter can no longer pretend.

It doesn’t hurt, really, not after the first few seconds, and he’s sure his nose isn’t bleeding or broken. Surprise has him gasping and rolling back, fear gripping him for the first time. Not at what Alex might do, necessarily, but what he can’t control.

“Peter?” Alex says, his voice scratching as he turns to him. “Fuck, I'm sorry.”

“It's okay.” Peter’s red faced, glad the street lamp doesn’t leak color into the room, only a pale sort of illumination. He can still see the curves of Alex’s frown clear enough as his eyes scan over Peter’s face.

“It’s not okay.”

“It is,” Peter insists, trying for lightness, “I’m more resilient than you think.”

“It’s not _fucking okay_ ,” he growls, sitting up and covering his face with his hands. “ _Fuck_.”

Peter keeps perfectly still, uncertain how to navigate around the anger. He can hear his dad’s voice, censuring gently, “They’re not broken, lad, never call them broken.”

Alex isn’t broken, Peter doesn’t know what he is, what he’s been, what he’s had to become. Peter doesn’t know anything other than he cares about Alex, and that’s got to be enough.

“Where were you, just then?” he tries, but Alex shakes his head. “You can tell me. I’d listen.”

Alex takes in a breath that sounds uncertain. “I’ve never said.”

“That’s okay,” Peter says, because he thinks it is. He’d just listen, he’d take it all, frightened as he is of what’s hidden inside Alex’s heart, his past.

“My father said to leave it in France. Had no place in the home front. That’s all we did it for, the home front, but we couldn’t bring it back with us.”

“Bring what?”

Alex looks over at him then. “The weight.”

It breaks the dam, it shatters before them into hundreds of thousands of pieces, impossible to reform. Alex tells him the whole truth of it, whispered in the night, like the truth might be sucked into the vacuum the silence between them makes.

It’s horrifying to hear, because Dunkirk doesn’t sound like the worst of it, once the whole story is out there. He watched a man walk straight into the ocean rather than stay on the beach and hope for a rescue. He narrowly avoided getting torn apart, nearly lost a hand. He took a knife to the gut, slicing deep and true, and that’s what sent him home. But not before he shot his attempted murderer in the face.

Alex remembers in startling detail, sharp enough that Peter sees it play out in front of him in the dark. He can’t look away, he shouldn’t look away. He asked for this.

Peter doesn’t know how to give forgiveness. It’s not his place, same as judgment. There is no cowardice in survival, the most human of impulses.

“I never fucking wanted it,” Alex whispers, a confession he doesn’t need to state explicitly but does so anyway. “I never fucking wanted to go.”

Peter reaches out, slowly, his hand inching until it connects lightly by the tips of his fingers with Alex’s where it sits on the bed, gripping at the sheets.

“I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want them to look at me, because I thought they could see what I did. I had to go. The people who knew me -- ”

He cuts off, grows silent enough that Peter guesses, just to keep him going, “They didn’t know you anymore.”

“You know me.”

London stretches miles and miles, full of millions of people, and the tide still floated them together, for the second time in their lives. He knows a lot more about Alex now, more than he’d ever thought to know. But a person isn’t a collection of events. They’re hardly a collection of choices, good or bad. They’re just a person.

“I do,” Peter says anyway because it seems to be what Alex wants to hear.

“Are you ashamed of me?” His voice sounds wet.

Peter doesn’t know if it’s shame or fear that sits heavy in his chest, weighing down his lungs and his heart. There’s an exasperation, maybe, the kind that you get when faced with insurmountable odds and every path that stands in your way is dangerous to say the least, impossible to say the most. There’s a care, maybe, not born from a need to fix him -- _they’re not broken, lad_ \-- but a need to understand. There’s an affection, certainly, that has him gripping at Alex’s fingers, as much of a reassuring squeeze as he can manage without thinking Alex is going to spook.

He shakes his head, no, he’s not ashamed, and moves his hand slowly until his arm braces Alex’s back and his hand cups his waist. Alex turns into him easily, his wet face finding the curve of Peter’s neck.

Peter whispers, “Let’s get some sleep.” Alex nods, cushioned against Peter’s chest still, and Peter eases them back slowly. He hopes Alex doesn’t remember himself, remember who they are, and shift away. This is the weight that matters, Alex’s resting on Peter’s chest, the two of them breathing in concert until Alex’s light snores lull him to sleep.

\--

Peter takes a shift on Sunday he’s never taken before, to preserve his savings, to keep Alex (and Alex’s cat) happy in a sea of milk. He’s loathe to spend any time away from his flat. He’s not selfish enough to think his presence keeps Alex together. After a while, he wonders if Alex is the one keeping him together.

Peter’s weight is different -- he doesn’t know if it’s lighter or less important, it’s just different.

He’s lonely, he’s realized, not too easily. There’s a loneliness that’s been eating away at him and he hadn’t noticed until it stopped. Everyone he’s cared for has been stripped from him, one by one, without notice, without checking to see if he’s quite finished with them first.

There’s a clock ticking in the background of Peter’s life, more like a stopwatch, counting down the precious seconds he’s got until the next thing gets stripped away. When he does an audit of his life, the only thing that’s left is Alex.

Just as he’s thinking he shouldn’t have curled his whole life around Alex, Alex walks in.

Peter’s meant to greet him, anyone who walks in at the sound of the bell above the door chiming, but he falls short. When he sees Peter, Alex looks caught. There’s no possible reason Peter could send him away, this is just another way to share what’s his with Alex.

Peter fights the impulse to hug him, as though they were perhaps old friends who came across each other by chance, instead of -- whatever they are. There isn’t a name for it, not that Peter knows, that can describe what Alex is to him. They’ve not invented a word for this yet, the sincere longing you have to call someone your lover, but who could never be.

“How’d you know I worked here?” Peter asks, pressing on a smile.

“I didn’t.” Alex shifts on his feet and looks around. “I’ve never seen you here on a Sunday.”

Peter keeps a lid on his surprise, that he’s come around here before. It’s close enough to the cafe. It’s odd, isn’t it, that they’ve shared a neighborhood for however long, that they’ve both made their homes here.

“Thought maybe you’d be home with the cat.”

“Haven’t seen him around.” He walks between the first two stacks and Peter shifts to watch his eyes trail across the titles, his fingers run along the boards and collect up the dust Peter should really clean.

Peter likes the look of him in his shop.

“D’you like to read?” Peter asks. He’s seen Alex with a book or two, but he’s never seemed particularly excited about it.

“I like the quiet.”

Sundays are dreadfully quiet, most families off at church or preparing for a big supper. He can see why Alex likes it. “This isn’t a library, if you’re gonna stay here, you’re gonna work.”

Alex quirks an eyebrow but quietly listens to his instructions -- greet everyone who comes in no more than six seconds after the bell goes. Peter will take care of the rest.

“I will be happy to do that for you,” Alex says.

Peter doesn’t take care of the rest, not for the first patron, a lady who steps in and is not only greeted by Alex, but is also gently led around the store by Alex. Peter tries not to think about Alex knowing enough of their store to navigate the few stacks to find just what she’s looking for.

Alex grins at her, everything about him is open, pleasant, charismatic. It’s nothing like the intensity he greets Peter with more often than not. Peter watches him talk her into buying an entire collected works of Jane Austen.

He carries the bundle of books up to the desk for her, crouching to place them gently before Peter on the desk. “This kind woman would like to be rung up.”

She shrieks with laughter; Peter thinks he’s missed a joke between them. She lays out more notes than Peter usually sells in an entire Sunday as he packs up her books into a canvas bag. She’s gone with a chime of the bell, and in the silence, Peter’s stomach twists.

His selfishness compounds once he realizes he’s not only in danger of losing Alex, he’s also in danger of having to share him. That the sharing could pull him away just as easily as anything else. The clock ticks louder.

Alex watches him carefully. “Should I not have done that?”

Peter shakes the realization from his face and gives him a gentle smile. “It’s fine, thank you.”

Alex doesn’t look like he believes him, but he accepts the lie. “You’re welcome.”

Peter rises to pour through the stack nearest to him, to ensure it’s alphabetized appropriately. Not to keep his hands and his mind busy so they don’t collaborate on a scheme to both latch onto Alex. His hands are easier to convince. “You’re quite good at that. Do you think about getting a job?”

Alex tenses beside him, his hand suspended before a collection of antique penny dreadfuls. “Do you want me to get a job?”

“It’s not -- like that,” Peter says, but what it _is_ like threatens to color his cheeks. “It’s just, I wonder where you’d be if you weren’t with me.”

“I’ve got other mates.” He plucks up one of the volumes and scans through its pages, moving too fast to really get ahold of what he’s looking, really. He must be keeping his hands and mind busy too, but from what, Peter doesn’t know. “Stay with them sometimes, sleep on their floors, get an odd job here and there to keep me going. I don’t mind it,” he says, firm enough that he might be trying to convince himself of it.

Peter doesn’t buy it. “Is that what you want?”

“What does it matter what I want?”

Everything, everything matters against what Alex wants. You can’t help what is or what will be, not completely. But if it’s not luck that pushes them forward but rather choice, then what he wants matters completely.

“Do you think you deserve to live like this?”

Alex sets the book down and keeps his eyes trained to it. “What’s to deserve? People sleep rough, it’s not up to you to say you’ve got it better than I have.”

“I’m not trying to save you or anything,” Peter says. Not again. “Just seems like you’re surviving and all.”

Alex looks at him hard. “Survival is enough.”

Peter shakes his head. That was fine for then, but it’s not fine for now. It’s what his dad was trying to tell him, why his dad pushed him to leave the house, to leave the village. “Survival is just waking up in the morning, survival is seeing another sunrise. But it’s not living.”

Alex looks as though he’s been struck. Peter doesn’t know what he’s going to do about it, if it’s too close to judgment that he should take it back. He doesn’t want Alex angry with him, he doesn’t want his dad disappointed in him.

The bell over the door chimes and there’s a delayed reaction from both of them, a synchronized head turn that snaps the moment apart and frees them from doing anything.

Alex steps forward with a pleasant smile and says, “Hello, how may I assist you?”

\--

There’s enough beer in them that they’re laughing, toasting the end of Peter’s exams in the kitchen instead of hiding away because Other George is dressing for some sort of social he’s never invited Peter to, and Peter’s never solicited an invitation. He’ll be out until morning and they’ll celebrate through the night in the kitchen.

Alex takes a long swig of his beer, his long throat jumping as he swallows. Peter must look away as a means of self-preservation.

Alex smiles more, over a cup a tea, around the food in his mouth. It shouldn’t be the kind of thing that changes the entire world, or even just Peter’s. Alex’s attention is a cure for loneliness, something that has Peter thinking maybe since his dad died, he’s only been surviving too.

He could say, “I feel alive sitting next to you,” but he won’t.

Instead Alex raises his beer, announces, “To the end of exams.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Peter says, clinking his beer with Alex’s.

Alex looks at him, his brows furrowing seriously before it all melts into another grin. It’s not a big one, anything shining and toothy -- it’s small, creasing his cheeks just so a hint of his dimples appears. It’s soft and it’s just for Peter.

“I’m proud of you,” he says, his voice as soft as his smile.

Peter tilts his head, a wry laugh on his lips, anything to distract from the thrill he feels just then. “Maybe let us wait for the results.”

Other George’s room heaves him out into the kitchen with a slam of his door. He watches them, tense, with his lips twisted as he does up his tie. “You got the rent, lad? I’ll give it to Murphy on my way out.”

“I -- yes.” Peter’s loathe to leave them alone, but he does, darting quickly to the spot under his bed to pull out whatever notes he needs to cover Other George’s share. He does a quick count of what’s left and marks it on the page he keeps clipped to the newspaper.

The floor creaks ahead of him; he looks up to see Alex watching him from the doorway. Peter stashes the bag quickly, but he doesn’t move to hide the money in his hands, not now that Alex has seen it. There’s not much to say about it, not anything that Peter wants to say. The furrow of Alex’s eyebrows says otherwise.

Peter presses past him back into the kitchen.

“When is he going to pay rent?” Other George asks, nodding off behind him.

“When are you?” Alex snaps back, startling Peter by having inserted himself into somewhere Peter hasn’t invited him. Where Peter wouldn’t invite him.

“Nobody fucking asked you, mate,” Other George starts, but Peter turns with a quieting hand to Alex.

“Leave it,” Peter murmurs.

Alex looks mutinous, but he defers anyway, disappearing back into their room. Peter’s room.

Peter turns to Other George so he doesn’t think twice of it. He hands over the money and warns, his voice stiff and dark like he doesn’t really ever let it get, not these days, “Don’t speak to him like that. Ever again.”

He doesn’t leave room for discussion because there is no need. Other George stands silent, dumbfounded, and, to be quite honest, Peter prefers him this way.

Alex sits on the windowsill, one arm snaked out through the small opening of the window, reaching for something out of sight. Peter moves forward and spies the cat, just out of reach and seemingly unbothered by it.

It feels familiar in a way that itches at Peter’s skin.

Alex doesn’t take his eyes off the cat. “Won’t come in.”

Peter scratches at his arm. “It’s a nice night.”

Alex makes a noncommittal hum but pulls his hand back inside nonetheless. The sun kisses the curve of his brows, his nose, his lips as it sets, its dimming light like the long, lingering traces Peter wishes he could grace him with. He should look away, for self-preservation, but he doesn’t.

“Should I go?” Alex asks, defensive like he expects the answer to be yes.

Peter can’t imagine how it could be yes, says, “No.”

“Other George -- ”

“Is a twat.” Peter sits down next to him on the windowsill, best as he can, his feet carrying his weight because his single arse cheek isn’t. He puts a hand to Alex’s chest and holds it there. “I want you to stay.”

Alex covers Peter’s hand with his own, silent, but it still says, nonetheless, clear as day, _I want to stay_.

Peter tells himself, _don’t lean don’t lean_ _don’t lean_ , like a mantra that’ll save his life, but it’s too easy to lean, too hard to look away from every sun kissed piece of his face once Alex turns it on him. He leans until Alex’s face shifts into what may be its default state, that heated look that darkens his eyes.

But it’s Alex murmuring a stuttered, “I’m not -- ” that has Peter realizing what he’s tried to do. He doesn’t know what the end of the sentence would be -- _like that, perverse, enamored by you as you are of me._ Any of them would kill Peter.

“I -- I’m sorry.” Peter’s eyes widen up at him, the plea dying before it passes his lips -- please don’t tell anyone, please never mention it again. He wants to recover his hand, but Alex keeps his own pressed to it, unwavering. It’d be a struggle to take it back, but Peter doesn’t want to take it back.

“Don’t apologize,” Alex says roughly, but he releases Peter’s hand anyway.

Peter takes the opportunity to distance them, his feet carrying him a few steps from the window just to break whatever spell the sunset is trying to cast on them.

“I think about you,” Alex says from behind him. Something in his tone suggests he should also say, _but I don’t want to_. That should feel like the end of the conversation, that Alex has said something the opposite of what he means.

When he turns, Alex is stood next to him, his eyes dark and considering. Peter doesn’t know what he expects when Alex lifts his hand slowly, but it really isn’t what he gets.

Alex traces around his face, his thumb at the apple of his cheek before it slides down to his lips, snagging against the bottom. Peter’s breath left him long ago, hours ago it feels like, but he’ll be damned if he takes another breath. It’s too tenuous, like a single reminder that Peter is alive and wanting could ruin the whole thing.

_Kiss me kiss me kiss me_ , Peter thinks, and it feels like it saves his life when Alex does. The first press of his lips is hesitant, it rather misses the mark, nearly hitting his nose. Peter makes up the difference until it’s perfect. Alex is warm, far more intoxicating than any liquor Peter’s had, and Peter drinks him in for hours.

It escalates faster than he intends, Alex pressing forward until Peter collides against his desk.

It’s stiflingly hot even with the window cracked open, and that could be the reason Peter strips his shirt. There’s too much between them and that’s worse than the heat. He gets his hands on Alex’s, running carefully up his torso and over, letting it drop to the floor.

There’s a scar running along his ribcage, faded by time. Peter leaves it alone, he’ll learn it another time.

Alex presses in again, lips stuttering against Peter’s neck when he connects with Peter’s thigh. Peter feels an odd mixture of surprise and extreme satisfaction to feel Alex hard against him.

Peter guides him, a hand around his back, another tangled in his hair, until their lips find each other again, sliding inexpertly in their desperation and uncoordinated attempt to get onto the bed.

It feels like it should be dark, that the only thing that lights their bodies is the streetlamp down the way. Because it’s illicit, not only because they’re men, but because it’s Alex, and Peter’s trained himself to think he shouldn’t have Alex.

The sun shines on them anyway, half-hearted like it does when it sets, and Alex is a comfortable, familiar weight on top of him.

Peter presses down on his lower back, an invitation shift Alex’s hips down against his, to finish what they’ve started. Alex does, once, like an experiment, and Peter holds his breath, hoping the results are as satisfactory to Alex as they are to him.

By the choked noise at the back of Alex’s throat and the next insistent drag against thigh, he’ll guess they are. Alex moves against him with purpose, never touching because his hands are clenched into the sheets, never fully stripping as though he couldn’t bear to feel the warmth of Peter’s skin, never opening his eyes like the reality of seeing them together might hit him too hard.

It’s just as well, maybe, because Peter feels as though he could burn him, every inch of his skin heating up in anticipation of his release. There’s a level of embarrassment in the hungry way Peter’s eyes take him in.

Peter digs his fingers into Alex’s skin and thinks he’ll never recover from this.

“C’mon,” Alex murmurs into his neck before nipping at it, and that’s enough.

Peter’s body shakes and tenses stiffly and shakes again, alternating as though it cannot quite decide how best to react to coming in his pants. The sensation is familiar and novel at once -- it’s happened before but not like this, never as good as this.

He’s never felt so loose, spread out so far apart he fears he’ll never be able to piece himself back together. He does so anyway, for Alex’s sake, who rests unmoving and uncertain and still very hard against him.

Peter shifts his hips, sensitive as he is, until Alex takes the hint and redoubles his efforts.

“Fuck,” Alex says poignantly, and Peter bites down on his laugh until it’s just a smile.

He runs his thumb across Alex’s cheek, suddenly jealous of how Alex had explored him earlier. There’s so much more of each other left to capture, with their hands and with their lips. He would ask Alex to know every inch of him, fuck, he would ask Alex to be inside him.

Alex gasps like he knows, like he sees it as clearly as Peter does in the moment, his brows furrowing and his lips twisting as he comes.

Alex pants down onto Peter’s face, his eyes opening at last. They’re dark and wet and trapped on Peter’s cheeks instead of his eyes. There’s almost a sense of disbelief in them that Peter can’t translate.

_You should kiss me now_ , Peter thinks, but he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t say it, doesn’t surge up to make it happen himself.

This was a good choice.

He slides his hand up Alex’s back until he can press against the tight muscle around his shoulder blade, until Alex softens and lets himself be eased down onto Peter’s chest for the second time since they’ve known each other.

They’ll regret this, maybe, once their pants dry stiff and unforgiving between them, but there’s not a chance Peter’s letting go of this moment, so singular, so impossible.

\--

Alex isn’t home when Peter gets home from the shop, and it’s disorienting to say the least. His pack is still in the corner by the desk and he’s left the window open, little traces of him scattered around the place. There’s a small ease of the tension in Peter’s chest.

The cat sits on Peter’s desk, tail thumping against the remnants of Peter’s exam notes. It looks at him, then looks away, never overly bothered to spare a thought for Peter. Alex is the only one that’s managed to pet the cat, once at the start. Otherwise the three of them tend to go about their own business, as though this were all perfectly normal.

“All right,” Peter says, waving it off like it’s actually criticizing him. He toes off his shoes before padding into the kitchen for their bottle of milk to find he hasn’t got one, nor a tin of tuna or any of the things he could imagine a cat eating.

The cat will have to live with disappointment.

“Sorry, I haven’t got any milk. We’ll go out once Alex gets in,” he says once he’s returned, but stops up once he notices the cat has moved to the floor.

The cat’s tugging at something under the bed, maneuvering its face until its got ahold of whatever it's after. A newspaper. The newspaper, yellowing at its edges.

Peter collapses to the floor suddenly enough that the cat startles, hissing and scrambling under the desk chair. Peter smoothes the edges of the newspaper, thumbing over George’s picture to ensure his article is still intact. The bag sits open under the bed, its contents on display in a vulnerable way Peter never allows.

He dumps it onto the carpet and counts it twice. It’s missing just over one hundred pounds, fuck. And Alex is the only one who’s seen it.

He retrieves the cat from under the desk with great effort, ignoring its indignant yowling, and sets it on the other side of the window even though it’s raining. He slides the window down slow enough that the cat gets the hint and jumps off before he closes it. He nearly throws Alex’s pack out with it, anything that feels tainted, to be cleansed out in the rain.

He’s been played for a fool. Alex had told him all along.

The dry boy under the bridge who’d dunked himself in the water to be saved -- _I knew he was like me,_ Alex had said. He’d played on the fears of those Highlanders, having them doubt just enough to turn out the French soldier. He’d faked a limp for three weeks to avoid the front lines. He’d thrown away his gun so they couldn’t tell him to shoot.

He spilled his secrets like they were the cause of his shame, but they were really a warning.

Alex is -- he’s a coward. He’s a coward and he’s broken Peter’s heart.

The clock stops ticking.

It’s utterly silent, even Peter’s thoughts have shut down to save himself from combing through every frown, every smile, every touch, every truth. He sits in the kitchen and waits, deaf to everything in anticipation.

When Alex swings the door open, Peter rises to face him. Alex laughs, running a hand through his soaking wet hair. Under his coat, he’s wearing a shirt Peter’s never seen on him, and he’s carrying a brown paper bag. That’ll be some of the money gone, then.

He tries to share the laugh with Peter, his free hand looping around Peter’s waist and pulling him in. Peter had pictured it like this, in his wildest dreams, he’d hoped for this, for Alex’s affection to become normalized, to become pedestrian even.

Peter steps back, his face turning to keep from receiving Alex’s lips.

“Hey,” Alex says uncertainly.

“Why did you take it?”

“What?”

“The money under my bed, why did you take it?”

Alex squints at him, like he’s confused. “I didn’t take anything.”

Peter shakes his head. He knows he’s given Alex everything he’s had, he’s shared it without asking, without telling, it’s just been understood. But not this, not the last traces of home, of the _Moonstone_ , not the only thing that makes him feel safe.

There are boundaries Peter wouldn’t dare cross if Alex set them out, but it appears Alex can hardly say the same for himself.

“You do what you have to. To survive,” Peter bites, anger fighting his embarrassment for dominance and losing, from the shaking in his voice. “Is that what this was? Survival?”

“Fuck you,” Alex growls, and there goes that scowl, turning his face back into something dangerous. The warning Peter should have received all along.

Peter had come to love the intensity, had hoped to recover it from sadness or anger and turn it into something passionate. It’s there for a moment, until Alex’s face shifts, the scowl cracking into disappointment, into fear. “I fucking knew you would -- ”

“What?”

“I knew if I told you, you’d hold it against me,” Alex says, and Peter remembers the one part in all the warnings that felt the truest  -- Alex crying quietly and asking, _are you ashamed of me?_

It’s not shame that Peter feels. It’s betrayal. Maybe they’re close to the same kind of beast. “You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to fight to survive, you can just _ask_.”

“What do you fucking know about it?” Alex thunders. “Any of it?”

Peter does know, he knows at least about actions and consequences, about watching the light fade from someone’s eyes. He knows about the bodies that littered the ocean in their wake, blood on his hands and a wound he couldn’t fix.

He doesn’t know the weight of a rifle and what it takes to kill. He doesn’t know what it’s like to step on soil that didn’t belong to him and fight for every inch he took up of it.

“But that’s not here or now,” Peter argues. “We’re safe, we’re home.” They’re two steps closer to putting a name to themselves. There’s no need for subterfuge, manipulation, whatever they want to call it.

Alex shakes his head, disgust painting his face. “I didn’t touch your fucking money.”

He wishes Alex would just admit it, though he doesn’t know what he would do then. “Where did you get that shirt?”

“I got a job. Packing groceries.” Alex throws the paper bag onto the floor forcefully, with the muffled sound of glass breaking as it hits. He turns on his heel and slams the door behind him.

Peter doesn’t move until he realizes the bag is leaking, soaking up the paper until it goes soggy at the bottom and gives way to its contents -- milk.

\--

He keeps Alex’s bag in his closet, packed up and buried away so he doesn’t have to look at it.

Peter gave him everything, fucking _everything_ , doesn’t know what he should have been asking in return. In retrospect, he might have looked desperate, eyeing Alex as often as he had been, for what? The hope of a kiss Alex didn’t want to give, because he isn’t _like that_.

He shakes his head. He’s not going to open himself up to a line of questioning that only sickens him further. He can’t afford to build Alex up to something that makes it easier in his mind to hate, give into those thoughts that haunt him as he sits in bed, alone, with the lights off and the window closed, cataloging all the people Alex could tell that would cause his entire world to come crashing down. To turn him out of his flat, out of his job, out of his university, until he had nothing left but his emergency stash.

To make them equals. Or worse. Because he’d fucked a man.

He wouldn’t want his father to be disappointed in him. That weight sits heavier on him than most everything else, the thought that he’s done something to dishonor the memory of his father.

He thinks it up to the ceiling in his room, darker than it usually is at night with the window shut and curtains drawn. He thinks, _are you ashamed of me for having thought he was broken_?

Alex could have gotten a job, Alex could have done so many things. Peter was so afraid the ticking would stop that he’d stopped it himself, for once, of his own accord.

Confirmation of the worst comes when he least expects it, from Other George casually frying eggs when Peter walks in from work. He looks up and says, “Borrowed a few quid off you, my dad’s money hasn’t come in yet.”

Peter blinks. “What?”

“That bag you keep under your bed. Borrowed a few from it. I’m good for it, though.” He takes a crunching bite, half a slice of toast at once.

A few. Over a hundred pounds, _a few_. Other George has known about it all along, then, has been through his room and seen and taken god knows what. Peter’s far more rubbish at keeping secrets than he thinks, far more rubbish toward Alex than he should have been.

In the end, Peter punches him in the face, awkwardly connecting with his cheek in a way that leaves Other George sputtering, half with the surprise of it, half because he’s choking on the mouthful of toast.

Peter slams his bedroom door behind him and braces himself against it, sliding on the floor and pushing all his weight in the event that Other George thinks he needs revenge.

He feels like a child, having done this last as a teenager, the day after his brother’s funeral where they had no body to mourn because it had been lost to the sea. He hadn’t hit anything then, hadn’t cradled his burning hand to his chest, hoping he’d broken it just so he could get something of what he deserves.

He was rash and he’s never rash, but he was scared and he’s always scared. As much as he’d felt used, he was showing Alex the same discourtesy. He liked that Alex needed him. He didn’t like knowing Alex could leave, that maybe it was money that could take him. Money sent him away from Weymouth and everything he knew, the same could have done for Alex.

This was a bad decision, not bad luck. Peter had taken fragments of potential truths and molded them into something ugly, then acted upon his own fear.

He’ll think of this, he’ll add it to the list of things he’s done wrong to trot out when he needs them. He’ll have a bulletproof reckoning of mistakes to prove he can be hideous when he wants to.

Point one - he locked the cabin door.

Point two - he wouldn’t wait for his father to cross the street.

Point three - he thought the worst of his only friend. His almost lover.

These are the moments he wouldn’t help, these are the reasons he’s lonely, these are the reasons he deserves to be.

\--

Peter feels things that are larger than life -- regret and love and confusion and hope and fear. They tower over him, make him feel small. They shake him to the core.

He hadn’t had more than a moment to feel much more than breathless the first time they’d sailed past a destroyer, propellers bigger than his whole person. He hadn’t had more than a moment at the time to realize just how he small he was, that the world was much bigger than he ever intended it to be.

He figures he’ll need to stay small and have small moments, to collect enough of them to feel big enough to rival a destroyer. Some moments will be bigger than others, simple as they are, and will stack up higher than he deserves.

Alex works at the third grocers Peter checks. He’d been prepared to go all day, to loop back to hit the evening crew, to come back the following day and the day after until he’d found him. Peter sees him packing groceries with a concentration that furrows his brows, and Peter knows this is a small moment that could lead to a bigger one.

The crisp white shirt Peter had seen on him a few days ago is tucked under a maroon apron. Three others wear the same thing -- a uniform.

Peter chooses his line, waits patiently with his single purchase, until Alex has no choice but to look at him. The smile dies as soon as they catch eyes, but it’s a small moment Peter will collect anyway.

Alex grips the bottle of milk tightly, doesn’t stow it in a bag.

“Hey,” Peter says.

“Hey,” Alex answers. His eyes flick down. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

Peter looks at his hand, ineffectively wrapped in cloth. “I hit Other George.”

The corner of Alex’s mouth twitches. “Probably deserved it.”

“He did.”

The cashier clears his throat until Peter hands him a few coins. He won’t move, though there are people behind him waiting to take his place. He should ask, but he doesn’t know how to ask. It’s more than a _can we talk_ , it’s a _can we fix this_.

“I have to work,” Alex says at length, his eyes flicking over to the cashier and back.

“I’ll wait.”

“Okay,” Alex says, and that’s another small moment to gather up.

He waits, nearly two hours, holding his bottle of milk as it grows lukewarm in his hands. He waits on the bench outside the grocers and sweats through his shirt from the nerves, though, if anyone asked, he’d say it was from the heat.

Alex doesn’t say anything when he joins him. He rounds the corner twice over, Peter scrambling up after him, until they’re in the alleyway the grocer shares with the florist and the accounting firm and no one’s there to see them.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, first and foremost. “I was wrong about you.”

“You were right about me.”

Peter blinks, he doesn’t understand.

“I think I stayed with you because -- I knew you’d take care of me,” Alex says, his face curved in a frown and pointed at the brick wall behind Peter. “I came to your home because I thought -- free meal or two, roof over my head.”

“I asked you to. You weren’t taking anything that I wasn’t giving.”

There’s the distinct difference, the boundary Peter’s drawn. Alex could have anything Peter would give him -- his home, his bed, his food, his attention, his lips. But the fucking bag under his bed, which honestly seems so little in comparison, that he couldn’t give. The money that serves not only as a remembrance of his father but his own conscience, which takes the shape of his father more often than not. The newspaper he’d kept and refused to cry over.

These were the things of what were, not what are, hidden away in secret and in cowardice. There’s a bravery Alex has in upending the contents of his past in a way that Peter never does. Peter had taken and taken from Alex everything he could give, and the things he’d given back, the food, the shelter, were nominal.

“I think I wanted to save you,” Peter says. “So you couldn’t leave me. So I would have a purpose. I wanted it to be you.”

Alex looks at him, his face softening. “I think about you,” he says again, and it hurts just as much. “Thought about you, when you weren’t there. And I’d wait. I knew it was more than a roof over my head because I’d wait for you to come back.”

Peter nearly laughs, not out of joy, but out of exasperation at himself. He’d never imagined anyone would look at him and echo the things in his heart and his mind. It had been an impossible hope he’d guarded against, even as he kissed Alex.

“I haven’t talked to anyone about it,” Alex says, almost a non-sequitur, but Peter gets the impulse. His mind runs faster than his lips can manage most days, and there’s too much here to think linear. “Haven’t seen anyone since who was there. Three hundred thousand of us, think you could throw a rock and hit someone who was there on Dunkirk Beach.”

Peter nods, encouraging.

“I told you everything, and I knew. It was different.”

“This is different,” Peter agrees, for another reason altogether.

“Didn’t know how to describe it until you’d said it yourself,” Alex says. “I wasn’t surviving with you, I was living. And I wouldn’t -- I wouldn’t have done anything to jeopardize that.”

Peter nods again, his cheeks pinking in shame. He can still feel the mortification vibrating off Alex then, the way he’d looked tortured as he’d said, “I knew if I told you, you’d hold it against me.” That’s not something you do to someone you’d shared trust with.

“I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“You had reason to,” Alex admits before narrowing his eyes. There’s almost a playful tone to his voice, that feels close to forgiveness. “But yeah, you shouldn’t have.”

Peter grins then, a small release. It’s a fatal blow to the dam they’d built up between them the second Alex walked out the door, the beginning of an understanding that’ll crumble whatever’s left to stand between them.

“We’re a sorry lot,” Peter says and he leans with purpose, without doubt.

Alex hums in agreement, his lips turning up at the bad joke as he presses in. The kiss is too brief, but Alex lingers, his lips hovering close enough to Peter’s that they buzz with anticipation. There’s a promise there, in Peter’s breath mixing with Alex’s between them.

“I have to get back,” Alex says, and that’s okay. Peter will wait.

The clock starts ticking again. It feels less frantic, less like a countdown, and more like the slow inevitable passing of time. Each second is one they get to spend together, and he’s greedy to collect them all.

“I’ll see you at home,” Peter says, an invitation, a wish.

“Yeah,” Alex says. “At home.”

\----

  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading. My sincerest apologies for any historical inaccuracies, but that's the name of the game.
> 
> If you need me, I'm [here,](https://wickershire.tumblr.com/post/163572389383/title-the-land-of-the-living-fandom-dunkirk) where I will now return to my regularly scheduled programming.


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